About
"HeavenScent"

There
has been a bit of a "buzz-on" about the distinctive sound of
the Circon
as heard on Tales
of Heaven and Hell.
Most people when hearing it immediately smile and shout out:
"Theremin!" Not quite. Yes, it DOES sound rather like an
idealized Theremin, that was the general idea. But don't you
find the subtle changes of timbre interesting, and more than
Lev Theremin's early device could do? (Next time I'll go
even further away, as the range of possible sounds with a
Circon setup is quite broad, but not as wide as
keyboard-triggered sounds.) Also, isn't the playing rather
more "in tune" than usual and the vibrato rather more under
control than you'd expect from a Theremin?Again, it's all because
this is NOT a Theremin. The Circon, short for "Circular
Controller" has an interesting
tale posted here on our site,
that you may wish to read if you haven't already. It has one
distinctive feature that stands out from all the rest for
me, though: it's a LOT easier to play than a Theremin! I
still can get only the most embarrassing warbles and sour
melodic performances from any "hands waving in the air"
Theremin (how ever did Clara do it...?!) Practice would
help, I grant you. But there are limits when your main cues
come only from the sound you hear while performing. Even a
violin has some tactile and physical feedback, some subtle
things you feel for in terms of hand and finger position, to
assist your quest for in-tune pitches.Back when I first
began, I found that playing an audio oscillator, the kind
with a pointer mounted to the pitch knob, one that stuck out
a ways against a semicircular frequency dial, was nearly
playable. That module inspired the Circon. Bob
Moog's Big Briar
company has expressed an interest in building all-MIDI
versions for sale of the Circon, eliminating the
gross-kludge it takes to get the signal into Digital
Performer in my studio. That would require enough interest
from all of you who want to produce this kind of warm, human
gesture in your music. You'll have to write him to prove
enough of you care to make the venture economically
worthwhile. It might not be, after all, in these days of
minimal art, minimal passion. We shall see...

Notes
on creating the MIDI files

What
you will find in the files below is the complete MIDI
versions used to generate the master track for HeavenScent
on TH&H, just as I composed and played them into my Mac.
For the purposes of download, I found the final version, and
went in and removed all the unused tracks (usually I leave
the blank deadwood in place, in case I want to make changes
later), leaving just the active 18 that went into the
complete orchestration. The tracks overview will show
you:

(click
the image for a full-size version)

You can see what each
track produces on the left. Most of them can be substituted
with similar programs on other synth equipment. After all,
even in the symphonic world no two orchestras sound exactly
alike! The percussion tracks are another matter. They are
rather complex special Kurzweil 2000/2500 programs that
would take a lot of bulk to detail here. Best to listen to
the final recording for clues as to what sounds are
triggered. None of them is crucial to the piece, as this is
primarily a melody-driven work, anyhow.The only impossible
programs/voices will be the Circon patches. These are really
not all that fabulous sounding by themselves: a bare
sawtooth or square wave, with some low-pass filtering, and
the pitch bend for the program set to move plus or minus one
octave. Mod data moves the filter up and down in attenuation
and frequency by a modest amount. Volume data is critical,
and is set to allow full cutoff up to maximum level, about
the usual. The spirit or "life" comes from the way the sound
gets played, as I performed it in real time (you can't
record such vibrato intensive human expressions at slower
than real time, or you fool yourself.)Later I did do some
tweaks and edits. When you open an individual Circon track
(tks: 15 =
main Circon, 16 = aux Circon)
you will see that the pitch bend data is chuggerblock
filled, while volume and occasional modulation values are
less densely, which is clear in this medium close-up
view:

(click
the image for a full-size version)

The vibrato is pretty
plain. Looks rather peculiar at first glance (if you're used
to MIDI graphic editing), doesn't it? See that thin
horizontal axis? That's the zero pitch bend line, which is a
somewhat arbitrary value when you're going to move pitch up
and down so widely as you perform the melody. This you can
make out is the start of the main theme of "HeavenScent".
The first lowish note has a quick fade in on volume (the
little "xxx" data mostly near the top) and but a few
embellishment "haystacks" of modulation, which remains
mostly constant in thus particular spot (other places use
more on TH&H.) The volume tends to "duck" down between
notes, just as a singer might do, in a long tessitura, and
fades slowly at the end of final phrases, again "for a
breath", as this arises out of live performance
gestures.Now let's go in for a
closer look. This is the start of the above, showing only
the lower middle portion enlarged in height and even moreso
in time:

(click
the image for a full-size version)

Now it's pretty plain
that the vibrato and all the other pitch embellishments are
actually quantized, but at a fairly high rate. Obeying the
Nyquest "at least twice a sampling rate as the desired upper
frequency", you can count many more than two values for each
cycle of vibrato. I usually set the data rate to be fast
enough to get four or five values stored for each vibrato
cycle. You try a value of MIDI data speed first, and record
it, then examine it exactly as you can see above. It becomes
clear at once if you are set to a speed too slow (vibrato is
not shown or gets "aliased", or too high (a real waste of
MIDI bandwidth.)In my case the MIDI
data speed is what I'm setting on my old but wonderful
Fairlight Voice Tracker, alas a unit not supported nor made
since about 1986-87. The Circon is an analog synth
controller for the old Moog synth, and doesn't provide any
MIDI out (Bob's semi-planned Circon units would handle this,
though, as his top of the line wonderful new EtherVox
Theremin units now already provide.) Let me recap what's
somewhere on that Circon
page: from the Moog
I adjust to get a very stable high flute-like sound. The
audio of that goes into the Voice Tracker. That changes it
into a MIDI stream that matches closely, at a rate set as I
describe above. The MIDI out of that goes once more across
the studio into my old JamBox, which is a fine 4 to 1 MIDI
merging unit. It merges with my MidiBoard, and other
devices, and goes into the MotU MidiTimePieces, and hence
into (Digital) Performer, where it gets recorded, as I
mentioned, in actual time.Once I have recorded a
decent performance that has a lot of feel to it, I examine
it as you can herein. If I find that the only flaw is a few
notes that may be a bit sharp or flat, but the overall take
is an expressive, good one, it becomes a "keeper". Then I
can lasso the region of such a slightly mistuned pitch, and
add or subtract about 100 pitch bend values. If that's not
quite enough, you may go for even a bit more (or less.) The
idea is just to tweak subtly what you never could tweak in a
live audio recording of a Circon (or Theremin -- you can
certainly use one of Bob's new MIDIfied units to record your
own), without destroying the performance in any way. Better
to keep an early good performance and do the refinements,
than to insist on what the old days of synth recordings
required: play things over and over until they are mostly
note-perfect. (But then the feeling was usually very stale
indeed...)Another important note:
the Circon is easier to play accurately than the Theremin.
But it's a LOT more difficult than a keyboard. Violin or
other string experience might be an asset. Not to scare you
off, as this sort of comment is true about ever decent
musical instrument ever made. Only recently has the illusion
arisen that one dosen't need to be musically adept to be a
musician(!). (Maybe we can join the Teamsters soon...) There
is simply no way around it I know of: you must practice
enough to be able to play the parts needed, freely and with
panache. It's not a big deal, just do it.

The
Downloads

Time
to check things out for yourself. You may wish first to
download clear full-sized GIF versions of the three images
above, to help you work out what you're looking at in the
MIDI files below. That's especially important if you need
use the generic MIDI format, which will lose all the names
and comments of the Performer files. With the first image
below, you'll be able to figure out what's missing, and take
it from there. Here they are, in hqx format as on the other
Resource
page image
files:

Now you're ready to
download a MIDI format file for your study and own personal
use (sorry, the composition and arrangement are copyrighted,
of course.) If you've read the above, you'll have a pretty
good idea of what these files are about, and how they were
produced. In my liner notes for the TH&H album, I had
only a brief commentary you have probably already seen --
I'll copy here just to be complete:

"HeavenScent"

Once
launched into a new musical space (with Afterlife), we
encounter HeavenScent,
which I wrote as an accessible melody driven piece. The
underlying harmony has a European jazz quality, with
atypical progressions and non-root bass tones.HeavenScent
is
also an etude for the Circon, which provides the main
solo voice, once the opening theme has been stated more
conventionally by a piano. I thought the upward sevenths
would be idiomatic with the constant portamento. The
somewhat romantic themes required a full use of human
performed vibrato, so natural on the Circon. It's
certainly a contrast to the other MIDI performed parts of
the orchestration.

Now go on and grab the
version that best suits your needs. There are three versions
here I generated for you. The first is the Performer 5.5+
one, than contains everything in the original. If you don't
have a recent Performer or equivalent application to open
that, try the file formatted according to the earlier
Performer 2.1+. Only a few things, like MIDI assignments and
patches will be lost. Not important for most of you. And if
you simple have no friend(s) who can help you(!), nor have
any way yourself to open that version either, go for the
general MIDI file format example, just be particularly
careful to follow the info in the first GIF above. Go for
it!